Great Throughts Treasury

"The destiny of the world is determined less by the battles that are lost and won than by the stories it loves and believes in."

"The imagination is not a faculty for the creation of illusion; it is the faculty by which alone man apprehends reality. The ‘illusion’ turns out to be truth."

"The appalling power with which metaphors of sexual lust illuminate the nature of war, and vice versa proves that they are based on millennia of human experience. The poets of all time have used these."

"There is no mystery in a looking glass until someone looks into it. Then, though it remains the same glass, it presents a different face to each man who holds it in front of him. "

"Emergencies crown their own kings."

"Hamlet is to Macbeth somewhat as the Ghost is to the Witches. Revenge, or ambition, in its inception may have a lofty, even a majestic countenance, but when it has "coupled hell" and become crime, it."